1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing control apparatus, and particularly to a printing control apparatus, a recording medium having recorded thereon a printing control program and a printing control method to perform preflight check of manuscript data.
2. Description of Background Art
A printing system is generally made up of a printing control apparatus and a printer. The printing control apparatus receives manuscript data from an external Personal Computer (PC). The manuscript data is created by editing and laying out a part to be used in each page, and described in Page Description Language (PDL). The printing control apparatus applies rasterizing processing (hereinafter, referred to as “RIP processing”) by a Raster Image Processor (RIP) to the received manuscript data to create printing output data. The printing output data is transmitted to the printer. The printer outputs a printed material, based on the received printing output data. In printing industry, speeding-up of the processing by the above-described printing system has been required for reduction in printing cost.
Conventionally, as one form of on-demand printing in which upon receiving a request, printing is performed, variable printing has been known. In the variable printing, a different printed material on a basis of a record made up of one or more pages is outputted. That is, the manuscript data received by the printing control apparatus in the variable printing (hereinafter, referred to as “variable manuscript data”) is made up of a plurality of records. For example, one record corresponds to a printed material regarding one customer (e.g., a ledger sheet, a bill, a direct mail or the like). Here, a content of each page (content) is implemented, using a resource that the page has. The “content” is made up of a character, a pictorial figure, an image, and a form. The “resource” is a generic term of color information and font information.
Moreover, in the printing control apparatus, generally, in order to avoid a failure of printing, whether or not the manuscript data has an error is checked (preflight check), and the checking is performed before the RIP processing or the like. In the preflight check, for example, error detection for various types of information such as a font, a page size, a color, and a resolution (hereinafter, referred to as “check object information”) is performed. As a result of the preflight check, when it is determined that there is no problem with the printing, a printed material is outputted. This preflight check is widely known, and for example, has been described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2010-66987, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-85180 and the like.
The number of pages of the manuscript data in the foregoing variable printing is generally several ten thousands to several hundred thousands pages, which is enormous. Accordingly, the preflight check cannot be performed to all pages (P1 to Pn), for example, as shown in FIG. 14, or it takes long time to perform the preflight check to all the pages (P1 to Pn). This contributes to an increase in printing cost.